THINGS THAT MATTERED

Just when the coyote was about to ski into space, Jake popped vertical from his horizontal on the sofa. He slammed his hand on the coffee table. Corn nuts jumped from the bowl.

“Damn straight,” he said. “That is the key to the answer to the logarithm."

We were all twice-baked, sucking on Red Bulls to stay awake, not sure what Jake meant. The coyote? Or the roadrunner? Or something else? He had solved some mystery, or thought he had, but we were wrapped in incoherence. We could talk, just not make sense. We rolled our eyes Jake’s way. He noticed.

“OK, here it is,” he said, settling his elbows on his knees and beginning to pack the bong. “What’s the best way to hurt somebody?”

“I dunno,” Marcie said. “With a nail?”

Me, now. Thinking: A nail? Can you believe that? 

“What kind, fingernail?” I asked.

Marcie and I had been together for two months. I wasn’t sure we’d make it another hour.

She blew some skunky smoke in my face.

Cinta started coughing. Then she said, “Kill them?”

“Little extreme, doncha think?” Jake said, “What happens when you kill somebody? They don’t hurt no more. I said hurt.”

 “Who ya wanna hurt?” Cinta said. “Tonight? I’m starting to crash.”

“Nobody,” Jake said. “Well, maybe.”

He bent forward and tamped some leaf and grabbed the lighter and stopped.

“Well, Berklee Bob. Bastard could use some pain. Fucker ain’t paid me for that last bag he begged off me. On credit.”

“How, then?”

Jake held the suspense. Put on a big shit-eatin’ grin, like he knew all the answers, not just the one we were now growing extremely eager to hear, given how he had commanded our attention and then strung us out so we were itching for a pop.

“Fu-UCK!” Marcie said. “Get with it, Jake-hole. How”?

For one brief second, I thought this whole discussion was a perfect illustration of why we had to keep calling our folks for school supplies, money, gym fees, and genital antiseptic lotion. And we had graduated eight months earlier. At first, they kept the Venmo funded. And then they didn’t. I wondered what tipped them off. We were about broke. Jake had my attention.

“You hurt their favorite stuff,” Jake said. “You don’t do a thing to them. You do it to what they love the most. Like, you steal their bike. Or break the tone arm on their hip new retro portable Victrola vinyl stereo. Hurt what they care about, and you absolutely destroy them.”

“Like your stereo?” Cinta said, “Your missing stereo?”

Jake glared, jumped up, and went to the kitchen for a beer. To chase his Red Bull.

“So you’re kinda describing a hitman, who hits things?” I asked, after he came back. “A sorta hit-thing?”

“More of a thing-hit-man. But you comprehende,” he said, pulling back from the bong and holding his breath.

“Is that even a … thing?” Marcie asked and turned to me, smiled, and tilted onto my shoulder. At that moment, I knew I would be with her until the end. Of the night? The week? Who knew? At some point in the future, when we un-become a unit, which was an event foretold, but hanging with her was pretty okay, for now, for the moments of foggy breath on the mirror. Yes, we were pretty stupid, too, but stupid can be cool if you know that’s what it is.

That’s when I remembered Jake’s roommate. The one who moved without paying his share of last month’s rent. And took Jake’s little retro stereo record player. And left no forwarding address. And Jake slid into a major funk, moping and doping around their place—his place—for a couple of weeks until his boss called and said, “Hey, asshole, we could really use you down here,” at which invective, Jake went back to pulling orders at the restaurant supply place down near the river.

“Maybe restaurants would be a good gig,” he said, walking into our place after work for a bowl. Marcie was barely dressed, and I was sleeping it off, so his timing wasn’t great, but then he said he thought he had seen a car belonging to Tray, the roommate, and followed it to where he parked outside a house with a door to a basement apartment. “I got the address,” he said. “And—?”

“Mess up his shit. For taking my hi-fi and the rent and all.”

I was trying to follow it. Marcie just shook her head and went back to bed and left me at the dining table, fiddling with my lighter, sipping cold coffee from hours earlier. Pizza would be good, maybe.

“Mess up?”

“You know, hurt him.”

“Maybe you already thought of this, but why don’t you knock on his door, and when he answers, ask him for his share of the rent and your hi-fi back?”

The thought seemed new to him. He stood up, walked around, talking to himself, then flicked his hand at me and left. I wasn’t sure if I should call the cops. What would I tell them? Where would I send them to intervene? Instead, I went for pizza. Pepperoni, Marcie’s fave.

She was up, sitting at the table, sipping a light beer when I got back. “Mmm,” she said, slurping a swallow. “Sliced spicy dick. My favorite.”

We shared beers while the thing baked. I cut it into quarters and served us, and the door flew open, and in comes Jake, all wound like a golfball. Red in the face, like on speed, an energy high. “Dude?”

“Mess with me, muthuh fuckuh,” he said to no one, spinning in place, mad dog eyes and hair swirling like helicopter blades. “Mess you up. Mess you the FUCK up!”

Marcie stopped chewing, looking at Jake, then me, worried now.

“Did you get your rent money?” She asked, “And your stereo?”

“Fuck that shit,” he said, top dog, boss hog, Mr. Moto Mojo. “I hurt that sonofabitch.”

“Uh, should we be worried? Cops?”

“No, nuthin’ like that. Here—"

He stopped, reached behind him toward his hip pocket, found what he wanted, and pulled it out. Then he shoved it toward me, inches from my face.

“He’s never gonna play that hi-fi again,” Jake said. “Not unless he pays for some major repairs.”

He waved the tone arm in my face, small wires flapping from the end that he had ripped from the stereo. I could see what he meant. I guessed they hadn’t talked about the rent, but I didn’t ask. He started to giggle and repeat his “muthuhfuckuh” invective and stomp around in circles.

“Let me get this straight, Jake,” I began, my way of trying to understand it by laying it all out loud.

“You went over and ruined the stereo he took to hurt him instead of taking it back so its loss wouldn’t hurt you? Any more? If you don’t mind me saying, you’re a fucking idiot.”

Jake stood in the middle of the room, the tone arm dangling from his hand. Like I had just connected some dots he hadn’t known existed. Even so, he had another layer of illogic to share.

“So, Tray loved that stereo enough to steal it, right?” Jake said, “But he didn’t take any of my vinyl. So the player was useless to him. He had the player. But he couldn’t play it. So after I tore off the tone arm, I tossed him a couple of classic 45s—Chubby Checker singing “The Twist” and Little Eva. Doooo, the loco-motion with meeeee! Bet he wants to play those puppies, right? Bet he can’t. Feel his pain right here”—he” grabbed his crotch and jerked“ it—“Don’t sleep on that, Major Butt Wipe.”

Instead of trying to engage any of the descending rat-hole logic, I grabbed another piece of pizza. I could relate to that.

“Bet that really hurts,” I said to Jake. “Good job.”

I watched Marcie disappear into our bedroom. I loved the way the hem of her tee-shirt hung down about halfway over her panties and sweet ass. She had other things on her mind. She was shaking her head like she couldn’t quite believe what she had just seen and heard. Like she had new information to process. Decisions to be made. Judgments are to be levied. My slice tasted like cardboard. I looked at it and saw why.